I am working on a more relevant blog post involving lots of data and charts looking at the process of tapering over my past year of racing and how Taupo lines up. Hopefully I’ll be able to get that up in the next day or two. It’s hard to say how much tracking numbers in the Performance Management Chart of WKO+ really helps with tapering. Are there patterns to good tapers and bad tapers? Even with my race schedule there’s a paucity of data points making it hard to tell for sure.

Beyond that I’ve some other interesting ideas relating to training load tracking and training planning. All revolving around planning weekly and daily applications of training stress and growth in fitness. I’ve recently been looking at planning future training as a series of blocks with easier days separating each one (genuinely easier days, not my 3 hour run easier days!). The idea being you build up training stress and fatigue over a few days, then ease back a little, then apply more training stress again. These smaller blocks are part of bigger blocks focussing on specific areas of interest. It’s not revolutionary I know!

What I’m considering now is modelling training load and fatigue and designing these blocks by structuring them towards delivering a particular amount of training stress each day. In theory you can then control how fatigued you get whilst slowly building up fitness. I guess that’s the art of coaching anyway, balancing fatigue with ever increasing training stresses. Whether I can produce a simple set of tools to help monitor this and how useful they might be is the question?

In fact I’ve decided that despite the sunny weather out there I’m going to spend my afternoon in Excel brewing up new spreadsheets. I’ll be getting a final long(-ish) run in later when it’s cooled a little.